The Day My Family Left Me to Die novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Private Room

Hattie empties the bins while the family agrees Nolan chose right and Chad offers to take over every arrangement; in the basement she hears Blythe tell the body it was supposed to stay gone, then Blythe stops behind her and asks if she heard anything.

The charge nurse cleared me at one in the morning and told me to go home.

I went to the supply closet instead and took Hattie's cart.

Heidi had said it quietly, before she left to scrub her arms: "They'll put you back on the floor. Let them. A cleaner can walk into any room in this building."

Hattie's key card hung on the cart handle.

It opened everything from the third floor to the basement.

I pushed the cart down the east hall with a mop in the bucket and my pulse in my teeth.

I had walked this hall to the cafeteria with my father when I was seven.

Now no one looked at me at all.

That was the first useful thing about being Hattie.

At the door of the family room, a social worker stopped me.

"Can you do the trash in here? They've been in there an hour."

I nodded, and she held the door.

My mother sat on the small couch with her coat still on.

My brother stood by the window with his back to the room.

Blythe sat beside my mother and held both her hands, and Chad leaned against the wall near the door with his phone face down on his arm.

I went to the bin by the sofa and bent over it slowly, in no hurry to be noticed.

"I keep running it again," my brother said to the glass. "The call. She was screaming. She said Millicent had sold them the code to the clinic safe."

"She was terrified," Blythe said.

"I know she was." He turned around. "I had a few seconds, Mom. One of them goes home, one stays, you choose. I chose."

My mother looked at him for a long time.

"You chose the one who was crying for help," she said. "I would have chosen her too."

My brother's whole face loosened, and he sat down on the arm of the chair.

I held the edge of the bin and did not look up.

"Millicent was always the strong one," my mother said. "She'd have walked out of that place on her own two feet."

She had.

She had walked out on two feet and bled on the floor of her mother's emergency room, and my mother had stepped around her.

"She did walk in," Chad said suddenly.

Everyone turned.

"I mean," he said, "somebody did. If she'd been alive when they let her go, why would they leave her at the door? It doesn't make sense. It could still have been them."

"They said they would send someone," my brother said slowly.

"Right."

"Chad," Blythe said. "Please. Not tonight."

She had a way of saying please that made grown men put things down.

Chad put his phone in his pocket.

"I'll handle the funeral home," he said to my mother. "You shouldn't have to make any calls. Let me take the paperwork, and the Fund, and the rest. All of it."

"You're a good man," my mother said.

I tied off the bag and my hands were shaking, so I turned the bin over a second time to hide it.

"Mom," Blythe said. "I want to see her."

"They've taken her downstairs."

"Just for a minute. Alone. I won't be long."

My mother put a hand to Blythe's cheek.

"Go," she said. "Take all the time you need."

Blythe stood up and straightened her cardigan.

I wheeled the cart out ahead of her and let the door fall closed behind me.

The service lift to the basement was for staff, and I took it with the cart.

I got there before she did.

The morgue corridor was long and cold and lit by one buzzing strip.

Her body was in the third room on the left, with the door open a hand's width.

I turned the cart so it blocked me from the doorway and stood behind it with a rag in my hand.

Blythe's heels came down the hall.

She did not look at the cleaner at the end of the corridor.

She went inside and the door swung to, but not quite shut.

I had never heard her voice without an audience.

It sounded flat and a little bored.

"You were supposed to stay gone," Blythe said.

I stopped breathing.

"Three days, Millie. That was all you had to do. Three days, and then it would have been over, and nobody would have needed you."

A drawer slid open on its runners.

"And you had to crawl in there and talk about the dog."

There was a soft clap, the sound of one hand pressed against another.

Then she laughed, once, almost kindly.

"Poor Nolan," Blythe said. "He'll never get over it. That's the part I'm sorry about."

Her heels turned.

I had only a second.

I pushed the cart sideways and bent down to the floor drain with the rag, and I knew that the girl who had just walked out of that room was looking at the back of a mute cleaner's head.

The heels stopped behind me.

They stood there for what felt like a long time.

"You're Hattie, aren't you?" Blythe said pleasantly. "The one who collapsed on the stairs tonight. They were talking about you at the desk."

I nodded without looking round.

"What a night to be working," she said. "Did you hear anything just now?"

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